Apollonian_Germ

I'd like to make a few points about the definition of this crucial term: concept. But concepts like 'love' and 'justice' have no picture available, in the sense that we can picture a bar of chocolate. "Picturing" is more akin to "imagining" -- not conceptualizing. A concept requires a minimum of TWO objects to establish a relation. When mentally picturing an object like a chocolate bar, you are imagining, not conceptualizing. That is because a bar of chocolate is an object-- it has form. We can only 'picture' something with shape. Love & justice have no shape/boundary/form that can be illustrated or imagined, they can only be conceived of and understood. A bar of chocolate is an object, whether real or imagined-- whether it exists or is only imagined. So, the term concept cannot be defined as 'mental picture'. Moving on to Rosencrantz' statement: "Force is neither a concpet nor an object. It's an interaction between two objects." This statement is very confusing for me, since my definition of the term is this: concept: relation between objects (relation here is meant in its very broadest sense, not in any technical or mathematical sense) So, force would be a concept, since an interaction is a type of relation between objects, and therefore a type of concept. Rosencrantz then moves on to provide three "layers of the World" as he puts it. These are not literal layers, of course, but metaphorical ones. He isn't talking about the Atmosphere, the Crust and the Mantle, of the world... However, in a rational and rigorous discussion, we cannot rely on such poetry. Literal, straightforward terminology should replace metaphors. But let's examine these statements to see what sense can be made of them: Here you have concepts governing concepts. Physical 'laws' are, as any scientist would tell you, descriptions in and of themselves. They are abstract recognitions of patterns of motion and interaction between the real physical objects in the world (which you seem to have forgotten about in your layers, placing phenomena on the list without any objects! How does phenomena occur if not by and through objects?) In reality, any action or interaction (even abstract types like 'governance') are mediated by and through physical objects. This has always been one of Stef's biggest points-- the State *does not literally exist* and it is not laws which literally act upon people-- it is just other people. Only physical objects can act upon other physical objects. If the Earth pulls on the Moon, keeping it flying around in orbit, there must be some physical mediator *between them* which causes the act to occur... "the law of gravity" does not qualify itself as a physical mediator-- it is merely a precise description of how that interaction occurs and what we can expect from it, but it does not reveal the underlying reality. So your layer three is indistinguishable from layer two-- the "laws" of gravity, electromagnetism, etc. are all descriptions of how things interact... but they are *not* explanations of the underlying mechanism responsible. It's more like super-advanced pattern recognition than the discovery of the invisible mechanisms that cause the patterns in the first place. But let's take a step back here... you used the term "being" a couple of times in statements such as "Layer 1 and Layer 2 are independent of beings." How do *you* define "being" because I have never heard the term used in such a way before. To my mind, being is synonymous with object/entity/thing. Phenomena and our descriptions of phenomena are not 'beings' in the literal sense (and again, in the context of reality, we really ought to drop the poetry and speak literally). In order to be a being/object/entity/thing, the referent of your term must have shape, at bare minimum. This is why a heart is an object (has shape) while love is a concept (no shape). A car has shape (qualifies as an object)... driving is a relation between the car and other things and does not have its own literal shape (qualifies as a concept). So, in language, all terms fall under one of those two categories: concept or object. Your three "layers" are confused, as I explained above, and they leave out the crucial category of 'objects'. Objects are that which has shape, and concepts are relations between objects. As far as I understand it, it's really that simple.

I think he's referring to the strong and weak nuclear forces.

Hi RoseCodex, yes and no. I am a critic of modern science like Bill Gaede, yes. He is actually a friend of mine. We both gave speeches at the 4th Rational Science conference in Mexico last February-- t'was great fun, he's really a lot nicer in person than he appears to be online haha. But no, I don't call myself an "objectivist" although, perhaps what you mean by the word may align with how I style myself. I think of what I do as "rational science". It's not what many people may think, which is a complete rejection of empiricism as a discipline or modern science as an incredibly useful tool for creating technology and making predictions. I have no problem with those disciplines, in fact I am very thankful for the fruits of those disciplines. However, I think of them as methods based on 'trial and error'. I do not mean that in any derogatory way, trial and error gets great results with the aforementioned activities, but trial and error does not necessarily result in a rational understanding of the phenomena. People are still stuck on 'forces','fields', 'waves' and 'space-time' and other abstractions that have been reified, or made physical, and used as mechanisms in physical explanations, and so they believe that the big questions, like how one planet can tug on another planet at a distance, or even how two magnets push or pull each other at a distance, or what an 'electromagnetic wave' is really waving on, are already answered. My answer, as well as many other great thinkers who I've met and discussed this with for over a few years now, is that we can replace these unimaginable Quantum theories that are based on using abstractions as physical mechanisms, with rational explanations using objects that are able to be visualized. No matter how small a thing is, it has form and can be visualized. So we re-imagine the atom, and light, and everything in-between to see if the magic we experience in the atomic and subatomic world can't be explained with good old-fashioned physical objects. And that's my philosophy of science in a nutshell haha.

Yes, AccuTron, it has basically become a tool of the State, to be honest. Half of it is meant to express weird alienating ideas, like the idea that nobody can really express themselves authentically and that all art is to be interpreted via the context alone... in the modernist view, all art must be a symbol of something else. The art-object itself is secondary to the conceptual analysis of the art object, whether that's an historical or psychological or socio-economic or gender/sex/race identity analysis... it MUST be something to be analyzed. Art in the past may have been meant to represent certain things, but the ideas behind them were never expressed at the expense of the quality of the art. The art was supposed to be interesting in and of itself, and in good at, the aesthetic pull is there before you could even guess what it might represent intellectually. But this modernist analytical type of aesthetic philosophy gives art critics and professors and curators and all kinds of other investors a great opportunity to peddle their political and social agendas. Believe it or not, the State definitely uses art as a weapon, and modernism was the perfect vehicle for it.

But wait, we all just agreed that concepts do not literally exist. "Force" is a concept-- not an object. "Force" is just a term which describes the phenomena that objects are pulled toward or pushed away from each other. Even Issac Newton said, "That gravity should be innate, inherent, and essential to matter, so that one body may act upon another at a distance through a vacuum, without the mediation of anything else, by and through which their action and force may be conveyed from one to another, is to me so great an absurdity that I believe no man who has in philosophical matters a competent faculty of thinking can ever fall into it. Gravity must be caused by an agent acting constantly according to certain laws; but whether this agent be material or immaterial, I have left open to the consideration of my readers." The "immaterial agent" that Newton was alluding to was God, but we rational scientists understand that such a supernatural mediator is impossible, so the question becomes, "What physical thing mediates the action/force of gravity? It is circular and unscientific to say "a force mediates the force..." There must be some mechanism conveying the force, as Newton said ^^. The correct configuration of the mechanism responsible is the big question. But this is getting a bit off topic. The point is that 'force' is a concept, not a physical object, and that this question of whether concepts exist is really quite essential in our understanding of even Physics.

I agree with this, however, taken to its farthest ends, this line of understanding leads to some conclusions that seem difficult for many modern intellectuals. Take for example, Ayn Rand's famous statement: Existence exists. Existence is a concept, the term denotes an abstraction, not a 'physically real thing' like an orange or an apple. The same goes for the term 'energy'. It is all too common for people to say things like, "energy exists..." or "electromagnetism exists" or "gravity exists" as if they were physical things with physical form, existing in reality like the apples and oranges. In reality, gravity, energy, electromagnetism, etc. are concepts no less than numbers are. They do not exist in the same sense as an orange exists... such terms denote relations between things in reality only-- and to imagine that gravity, or spacetime, or any other abstraction of mathematical physics exists allows for people to utilize them as if they were physical mechanisms or causal entities in phenomena between objects. This is, I think, why Quantum physics and mathematical physics in general has become so completely irrational and unimaginable. Concepts have been subtly converted into physical mechanisms.

Hey! I am also from Chicago! What part are you from? I'm around the Oak Park area, just outside the west side.

Hi everyone, I am a long-time listener of FDR (probably about 6 years now) and have always loved the show. Stefan Molyneux is a great leader of our times and it is amazing to be a part of a conversation that the future may look back on as being just as important as the peripatetic conversations between Aristotle and his students. I have especially enjoyed the direction Stef has been going in with his anti-leftist arguments, especially regarding racial realism and other key issues. I'd like to become an active part in this forum and hopefully meet some people and make some friendships. My biggest interests are history, Art, religion (as a psychological phenomenon), Science, rationality (what exactly does it mean to be rational?), poetry, storytelling, music, and more. If it is appropriate for a post like this, I'd like to include a list of links to my online presence: A collection of my poetry - http://hellopoetry.com/michael-e-huttner/ My youtube channel - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCBcFYMX-DwvpIA9nhgOq1SQ Science satire page, Mathemagics 101 - https://www.facebook.com/mathemagics101/?ref=br_rs Thanks for the opportunity to be a part of this great community!

This truly is a fascinating documentary. It's funny to see the Chinese perspective on western colonialism, since they haven't been totally beaten down with the club of guilt and shame that Europeans have.

Hey all! Glad to be here, thank you for allowing me onto this forum... I've been a follower of Free Domain Radio for almost 6 years now and have always really enjoyed the show. I recorded myself reading aloud a fantastic article by the artist Miles Mathis called "The Art of the Lastman" which takes a very broad overview of Modern Art through the lens of Nietzsche's concept of 'the lastman'. It's kinda long, but as a community of people who is used to listening to Stef's podcast, I thought that if anyone had the attention span to really enjoy this, it would be you guys. This is my first extended reading too, so please let me know if there's anything I can do to improve. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7jmLzuZimmo